This should have been a story just about music, about a fruitful and enticing cross-cultural collaboration between an Israeli pop icon and the scion of an African musical dynasty. Instead, we begin with a battle of petitions and committees, pitting the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement against supporters of the State of Israel.

Despite his powerful attraction to literature and the visual arts, Sigmund Freud was by his own admission utterly immune to the charms of music. In a 1914 essay, he wrote, “I spend a long time before [works of art] trying to apprehend them in my own way, i.e. to explain to myself what their effect is due to. Wherever I cannot do this, as for instance with music, I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure. Some rationalistic, or perhaps analytic, turn of mind in me rebels against being moved by a thing without knowing why I am thus affected and what it is that affects me.”

For the second time this year, a musical takes as its inspiration the biblical “Song of Songs.” “Shulamit,” a Hebrew-language drama (with English supertitles), is the brainchild of Dina Pruzhansky. (It follows Andrew Beall and Neil Van Leeuwen’s “Song of Solomon” this summer.) Pruzhansky is a COJECO BluePrint Fellow (the program facilitates projects from young Jewish adults of Russian origin). Radio broadcaster Robert Sherman hosts the opening night event.

The guitar rings like chimes, sounding almost celestial. The bowed lines of the double-bass sigh like a human voice, yearning. The textures and timbres that come out of the instruments are as rich and full as those of a much larger ensemble. It is, quite simply, an enchantingly beautiful sound.

There’s a lively contradiction at work in Basya Schechter’s music. On the one hand, as the singer-songwriter and leader of Pharaoh’s Daughter says, “I love the pentatonic scales; they’re sweet and mournful and yearning.” On the other hand, as her excellent new album, “Dumiyah” (Magenta), reminds a listener, one of the great strengths of her music is the clarity, poise and above all, the simplicity with which she sings, a vocal sound that is stripped of ornamentation and the fake emotion that mars much contemporary music.